While watching Andor and Cars of the People, I have been noodling on how large bureaucratic tyrannies fail. Because fail, they do. The Stasi and KGB and other deeply invasive and evil regimes had countless ways to torture and dominate the populace, but they also eventually fell apart and collapsed. And in the lessons of those failures, I think there are some pointers for how our very own Deep State can be undermined and destroyed.

We find ourselves in a regime that has enough “Gotcha!” laws to ensure that none of us is safe. Others have pointed out that the average American professional commits three felonies a day. Crime Squad!

An IRS audit (latest requirements requiring filings for a mere $600 in “mystery” income, or the “Gotcha” of “Do you own any cryptocurrency”) is enough to strike terror in any civilian heart, whether innocent or guilty. Show the Deep State the man, and the Deep State will tell you the crime. I am reminded of the common entry form to the United States, part of which is shown here:

Notice anything screwy about this? Line 11(a) buries the word “food” in the question, on a form you’ll fill out at the end of a tiring and frustrating journey packed into a commercial airline seat. So if you fly into the US and have a granola bar or snack with you of any kind, you can be nailed for a penalty of up to $10,000. Oh, and if you are Global Entry, you are not even asked the question — but if you do not go out of your way to declare it, then you can be hit with the penalty and lose your status. So there is a “Gotcha!” right there, usable any time by the Deep State, with effortless abandon.

The end result is that we are all criminals. Except that the real bad guys, those helping FTX or Epstein or drug kingpins, or at least those able to regularly pay off the right politicians (and share the Deep State’s goals), are all in the protected class. You and me — we keep our heads down. Practically speaking, the crime is not an error by committing an accidental felony or wrongly filling in a customs form. Committing the offenses is inevitable, merely a question of time. But the crime happens when we get caught.  And we avoid getting caught by avoiding attention of any kind as much as possible. Any attention from the Deep State can be ruinous, even if you are squeaky clean. Which none of us, thanks to our ignorance of all the stupid Gotcha Laws, actually can be.

How do we undermine the tyranny? The same way it has been undermined everywhere throughout history. Tyrannies fail when the people can no longer bear them (see Iran today), but they do not fall away gently. It takes a cataclysmic event — a general uprising, or selective rebellions (everyone homeschooling). Which despite my dreams of a truly divided America, does not seem to be on the horizon.

Putting power in the hands of unelected bureaucrats always – always – leads to corruption. The bureaucrats feather their own nests like Russian quartermasters provisioning an invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, at some point, the system comes to rely on that same corruption, without which essentials cannot reach their destinations. People serve their self-interest first, and the farther their self-interest is from a working feedback mechanism (like the market), the more surely and swiftly the bureaucrat becomes insulated from the actual task for which they were hired in the first place. Federal employees who effectively cannot be fired become warlords in their own right, fiercely defensive of their own fiefdoms. Anyone – a Trump or Truss – who threatens those fiefdoms finds the entire bureaucracy turning against them, with devastatingly effective results.

Is it too much to hope that a President DeSantis (in the unlikely event he could win an election against a potted plant with the Deep State in its corner) might succeed where everyone else has failed?